Another pulse.
The rovers changed course, veering toward a single point like bloodhounds or piranha.
“Don’t fight me,” Vonnie said. “Please.”
The rovers’ telemetry jumped with an empty datastream. There were no more erratic radar pulses. Lam hit them with a squeal of white noise. If the blaring static was intended as a defense, it was useless. The rovers continued to triangulate his position as he crawled away, twitching and jerking through a short five meters. Maybe it was all he could manage.
Vonnie suffered with Lam, praying for him as she blasted him with patches and rewrites — not demolishing his personality but adding to it — reforming it — kneading him like a hand squeezing a hundred irregular hunks of dough into a single ball.
Beneath the ice, he writhed, distorting their transmissions with more white noise. Then there were two words:
—Von. Stop.
“I won’t. These are your own sequences. It’s who you are.”
—Don’t make me Lam again. Not any more than I am now.
Ash charged past Vonnie’s chair and threw herself into the next station, activating her display. “Don’t listen to him,” Ash said. “It’s nonsense. He’s fighting the only way he can.”
—You’ll ruin everything.
Vonnie stared at her reports. “What are you talking about?” she said. He was almost whole again. But when the white noise dropped away, it transformed into a dense, overlapping feed of sonar calls.
—I’m inside a sunfish colony. Two days ago, they adopted me as a member of the tribe.
“They think you’re a real sunfish.”
—Yes. Yes.
“Oh shit. And we’re changing him,” Vonnie said to Ash. “Is there any way we can recreate his mental state before our transmissions?”
As Lam grew more coherent, improving from a deranged AI to a Level II intelligence, her display came alive with new datastreams. He added holo imagery modified from radar signals. He added infrared and X-ray.
He was surrounded by sunfish. Dozens of them clung to a rock slope below and beside him. They filled a narrow crevice where the lava had been worn smooth by years of use. Radar showed an opening in its highest corner. Otherwise the crevice appeared to be a dead-end.
Why would the sunfish constantly visit this place? The rock was dead and cold. There were no bacterial mats, no bugs, no fungus.
The pack clustered in a warm mass. They rubbed at each other and crooned and sang. Lam had been one of them, voicing the same contented harmonies. They’d accepted him as a natural part of their mild, sluggish dance. But when his mind was altered, so was his body.
As he resisted Vonnie’s slavecasts, his spasmodic movements had alarmed the nearest sunfish. Then a subtle difference fell over him as her corrective sequences took hold.
Five individuals shrank back from him, their voices sharpening in pitch. Familiar tones of surprise and challenge rose among the tribe. Their song ended. The group turned on Lam with bared, open beaks.
—Help me.
Their screeching grew louder. It became a war cry.
Top Clan Eight-Six Map
49.
“Ash, I need an open link to our mainframes!” Vonnie said.
“Then you’d better call Koebsch,” Ash said. “He’s blocked everyone from—”
On their displays, a female sunfish slapped at Lam with two arms. Although he weighed more due to his alumalloy frame and internal sensors, she was bulkier. Females had more size than males in both breeds of sunfish. Her slaps were like roundhouse punches to his ears as the pack warbled and shrieked.
Lam screamed, repeating their harmonies. That seemed to be the wrong answer. The female sunfish wrapped an arm tip around one of his arms. She used herself like an anchor while three more females encircled him.
He screamed again, frantically signing with his free arms.
“Please.” Vonnie clutched Ash’s wrist, unconsciously mimicking how the sunfish had snared Lam.
Ash flinched and pulled away. “I can’t link him to our central AIs, not without checking him first,” she said.
“If they kill him, our next step is helping the FNEE kill them. This is everything we’ve worked for.”
Vonnie saw one solution. They couldn’t restore Lam to the irrational state in which he’d somehow befriended the sunfish, but they could transform him into a hyper-fast Level I intelligence, combining their master databases with everything he’d learned during the past few days. He also needed more processing power. Given remote access to their central AIs, Lam should be capable of reproducing the same behavior that had let him fool the sunfish.
“Okay.” Ash’s tone was grim. She unlocked a data packet on her station — a packet she must have designed as soon as Koebsch restricted access across camp. “I can get in,” she said. “I need five seconds.”
What if we’re already too late? Vonnie thought.
Each of the four females took one of Lam’s arms, immobilizing him. Other females gathered nearby. He stopped struggling. They probed his top and underside, roughly sniffing and tasting his body.
“Go,” Ash said, cutting her hand sideways toward Vonnie’s station. The three-stage chain she’d arranged turned green — Lam — rovers — Module 01. Their central AIs joined with him, multiplying his intelligence by a factor of ten.
The transition wasn’t flawless. Lam jerked again as if fighting the sunfish, who yanked at him, splitting his skin twice. Synthetic blood dribbled from his lacerations.
Two females covered his wounds with their arms, drinking the fluid. One of them shuddered, knotting her body, increasing the torque on Lam’s arm and causing a sudden tug-of-war between herself and the others.
The sunfish screamed.
His blood isn’t right, Vonnie thought. They can taste the preservatives we used or the hormones are wrong or the oxygen content. It’s over. Nothing we’ve done was good enough to solve the differences between our race and theirs…
“Look,” Ash said.
Lam bent his torn arms, offering his injuries to the females. It wasn’t an act of submission. It was a purposeful, confident gesture. At the same time, he amended his cries. He stopped echoing the harsh melodies of the pack. He introduced a new song, slower and reassuring.
One of the females let go of him, then another. They coupled their pedicellaria with his, exchanging complex ripples.
When he spoke in English on the radio, his voice was different. It held the superhuman calm and self-possession of a Level I intelligence, the same self-possession Ash wanted to emulate. He said:
—They’re reaccepting me.
“Christ, I thought you were a dead man,” Vonnie said. Then she laughed awkwardly. Man, machine, she thought.
The females released him. Other sunfish squirmed closer to scent or taste his wounds as the pack settled down again. Most of them returned to their sluggish mingling.
What had Lam done to convince them? To her, it had looked like a few notes of song and gyrations. But for the sunfish, attitude was everything. When he acted abnormally, they regarded him as a contagion and a threat. If his conduct was appropriate, they trusted him again.
“Tell me what’s happening,” Vonnie said.
—They’re resting. Teaching. The females lead each other and the immature males through growth and memorization lessons.